The Comtec Technology Platform
At Comtec, we see ourselves as trusted technology partners for our customers and clients.
Our systems are business critical for our customers, whether it be our tour operator system, our travel agent applications or our travel integration middleware.
A high-level view of the major components in the Comtec Travel Platform.
We build our applications using the .NET technology platform from Microsoft and the Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) platform from Sun Microsystems. Using the latest releases of both platforms, our applications provide the flexibility of multiple channel distribution with aplomb along with the horsepower needed to handle the data volumes. We also leverage the integration capabilities of both platforms to integrate seamlessly into the hybrid, best of breed architectures that we see our clients adopting more and more.
Our Technology Goals
At Comtec a small number of core goals drive everything we do with technology. These goals are:
- Deliver the functionality our customers need and keep it simple
- Deliver the required performance
- Deliver the required scalability
- Deliver the required stability
- Deliver low total cost of ownership (TCO)
- Keep the system open
Benefits To You
So what does all this mean to our customers? Well, it means that Comtec applications display rich content including multiple images as slideshows, extended textual content, maps and multimedia and are either browser-based or browser-deployed, making them more intuitive to use and easier to manage in large organisations.
The Comtec Travelgateway delivers the fastest and most accurate pricing in the UK today for package holidays and charter flights. In addition, the Gateway integrates flight providers, cruise, insurance, car hire and multiple other ancillary travel components to allow our customers to seamlessly search, cost and book any holiday - from the the simplest to the most complex. Our B2B travel agent applications are deployed on more than 60% of all travel agent desktops in the UK today and the latest of these - Travelconnect - provides travel agents with the selling application they need to convert lookers into bookers.
Our B2C applications allow our customers to build their own online presence, leveraging the Comtec distribution platform to power their own B2C strategy. We recognise that the web is sometimes a free for all, so we support all major browsers in our B2C applications, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari from Apple. We also work with our customers to design their websites in such a way as to minimise look to book charges incurred from third party data providers.
Open Standards
We are committed to open standards. In today's technology world, almost every solution is best of breed. That usually means multiple vendors slotting together in a type of Service-oriented Architecture or SOA, to deliver the functionality your business needs. Comtec supports and indeed contributed to the seminal XML specifications in the travel industry, including TORIX, OTA and the T4 availability file standard.
Our web services (both SOAP and RESTful XML over HTTP APIs) are regularly consumed by customers and third party software houses using .NET, Java, PHP, Perl, Ruby on Rails and other technologies. We deliver the flexibility you need to build the architecture your business needs.
Our software runs on commodity hardware, including the latest multi-core CPUs from Intel, AMD and Sun. We regularly benchmark and load test our software on the latest hardware to ensure that we are taking advantage of the continual increase in processing power afforded to us by vendors like Dell, HP, Sun and more. Our own data centre infrastructure is completely virtualised, and we take advantage of that by offering customers innovative ways to use our software - local deployment, remote deployment and Software as a Service (SaaS).
Building For The Future
Finally, our customers care about the future and we do too. We are a Microsoft Gold Certified partner and regularly engage with key vendors like Microsoft to ensure that our internal technology roadmap is aligned with theirs - .NET 3.5, the Vista OS, Windows Server and SQL Server 2008 and IIS 7 are all supported as is Java 6 running on the latest versions of Linux. We commit to continually support and leverage the latest technology stacks because the Comtec technology platform delivers the functionality your business needs and is designed to scale and perform as your business grows.